46 Genius Gifs

45 Babies

44 Joy

43 Beauty

Carolina Garcia Delfin, 94, a Filipina nurse who fought in the resistance against Japanese forces during World War II, kisses President Obama after he mentioned her in his remarks to American and Philippine troops at Fort Bonifacio in Manila, Philippines (Photo by Pete Souza)

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42 ‘Gov. Christie Traffic Jam’

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41 OMG! It’s him!1!1!

First Lady Michelle Obama and student performers react to seeing President Obama as he drops by the White House Talent Show (Photo by Pete Souza)

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40 The New White House Videographer

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39 Danny Hating On His Attention-Rival: TOD

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38 Funniest. Vine. Ever.

I was so excited about the President's visit, I took this crowd video sideways. But it's still cool. vine.co/v/OOwzzzdZvLY

(Chips: Eric is one of my very, very, very, very favorite people on the Twitter machine, so I DM’ed him and said ‘Oi, you! Would you like to put together a post for TOD on your most memorable moments from 2013?’

As someone who has a big sister and knows how trying that relationship can be at this age, I LOVED this one.

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9 A Wise and Empathetic Latina on the Supreme Court

This year Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor published her book “My Beloved World.” I read it immediately. It moved me beyond words to think that we have someone on the Supreme Court who has lived her life. During her book promotion tour, this happened (see here):

When the moderator read a question from Tabbie Major, age 7, about which books Justice Sotomayor loved as a child, she found the girl, locked her in an embrace, held on while reminiscing about Nancy Drew mysteries and then called out for a photographer to capture the moment. “

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8 The Evolution of Mom-Dancing

Nuff said. FLOTUS pulls off the comedy gold of the year!

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7 Marriage equality spreads like wildfire

This is how we celebrated in Minnesota.

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6. Those red shoes!

We all know what happened that day. Wendy Davis showed us how its done. We’ll all love her forever for that!

10. President Obama explains the lipstick on his collar at a White House reception for Asian American Heritage Month. Don’t worry Mrs O, the culprit was auntie of Jessica Sanchez.

“Look at this!”

“Look at this!”

“I do not want to be in trouble with Michelle. That’s why I’m calling you out right in front of everybody.”

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9. The adorable Kid President receives a personal tour of the Oval office from President Obama.

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8. Malia photobombs Sasha trying to get a picture of their mom and dad kissing because she’s awesome.

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7. Sunny Obama, the diva puppy, is welcomed into the Obama family! I’m sure she is the source of much of President Obama’s new gray hairs.

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6. President Obama speaks directly with Iranian President Rouhani. It was the first direct contact between U.S. and Iranian presidents since 1979. Yeah, I’d say that was a BFD.

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5. During his commencement speech at Morehouse College, President Obama went off-script to acknowledge gay Morehouse men. As a recent graduate of a prominent HBCU, I found this moment to be of great significance.

Full speech:

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4. After George Zimmerman was found “not guilty” for murdering Trayvon Martin, many of us in the African-American community expressed pain, doubt, and an overall sense of hopelessness.

NYT: Mitt Romney has just come off a couple of rough news weeks in his quest for the presidency, but if Clyde Tennyson, 62, of Hampton, Va., is as typical of the baby boom generation as polling data seem to suggest, there is more bad news to come.

Mr. Tennyson voted for Senator John McCain in the 2008 presidential election….. This time, he says he’s voting for President Obama, a shift that a sizable number of his fellow boomers are making, according to recent polling data.

…. What is moving the baby boom voters? It may be Medicare … Lark McDonald, 51, who owns a small business in the Denver area, says he voted for Mr. McCain last time, and usually votes a straight Republican ticket, but is leaning toward Mr. Obama. He worries that the Republicans are moving too far right, he said, but he is also concerned they will dismantle the Obama health care program and make major changes in Medicare…..

…. In the last election, Howard Litvack, 53, a finance manager of a car dealership in Franklin, Tenn., backed Ralph Nader, as a protest vote. This time, he says, he’s voting for Mr. Obama. “It’s more important this time to have my vote count,” he said. “There’s more at stake.”

Washington Post: …. The notion that Obama has skipped his intelligence briefings was promoted by a right-leaning research group called the Government Accountability Institute….

….. Ultimately, what matters is what a president does with the information he receives from the CIA. Republican critics may find fault with Obama’s handling of foreign policy. But this attack ad turns a question of process — how does the president handle his intelligence brief? —into a misguided attack because Obama has chosen to receive his information in a different manner than his predecessor.

As it turns out, no president does it the exact same way. Under the standards of this ad, Republican icon Ronald Reagan skipped his intelligence briefings 99 percent of the time.

Paul Krugman: Mitt Romney is optimistic about optimism. In fact, it’s pretty much all he’s got. And that fact should make you very pessimistic about his chances of leading an economic recovery.

As many people have noticed, Mr. Romney’s five-point “economic plan” is very nearly substance-free. It vaguely suggests that he will pursue the same goals Republicans always pursue — weaker environmental protection, lower taxes on the wealthy. But it offers neither specifics nor any indication why returning to George W. Bush’s policies would cure a slump that began on Mr. Bush’s watch.

In his Boca Raton meeting with donors, however, Mr. Romney revealed his real plan, which is to rely on magic. “My own view is,” he declared, “if we win on November 6, there will be a great deal of optimism about the future of this country. We’ll see capital come back, and we’ll see — without actually doing anything — we’ll actually get a boost in the economy.”

Rupert Cornwell (UK Independent): Has there ever been as inept a recent presidential candidate as Mitt Romney? By comparison Al Gore and John Kerry, both mocked in their day as wooden and robotic, were models of empathy, nimbleness and lightness of touch. The Romney campaign, moreover, is supposed be the tightest-run of ships. Instead it – or more exactly its standard-bearer – generates gaffes by the boatload.

….. for Mitt Romney this time, there may be no recovery. The candidate wants to depict himself as a problem-solving businessman, seeking to improve life for everyone. Instead he has merely reinforced the stereotypical image put about by his opponents that he is a country-club elitist, a Darwinian capitalist who neither understands nor cares one whit about the problems faced by ordinary, less fortunate citizens.

…. It is hard to see now how he rights the ship… The astonishing thing is that he should know better. Mr Romney went through the presidential campaign meat-grinder in 2008, yet he still makes the same mistakes …. Messrs Gore and Kerry were losers. Candidate Romney, barring a massive improvement in these final weeks, looks set to join them.

Michael Tomasky: Conservative columnists are lining up to dump on Romney. But the real problem isn’t the candidate or his campaign. It’s the Republican Party and its pathologies.

Yes, Mitt Romney had a week I wouldn’t wish on … well, Mitt Romney. Yes, his campaign is incompetent, as Peggy Noonan wrote Friday. Yes, there is something really off about the guy personally. But as conservatives like Noonan start in on Romney vilification, I feel the need to stand up and reiterate: Romney’s problems aren’t all Romney’s fault. They’re not even half his fault. They’re chiefly the fault of a movement and political party that has gone off the deep end. Almost every idiotic thing Romney has done, after all, can be traced to the need he feels to placate groups of people who are way out there in their own ideological solar system, with no purchase at all on how normal Americans feel and think about things. This is much the harder question for Noonan and others to confront, and they really ought to ponder it.

Andrew Sullivan: …. Who Is Washington’s Most Effective Politician? I think Obama is easily the winner and currently stupidly under-rated – and drowned out by all the noise in the conservative-media-industrial-complex.

Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.

On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.

…. When I read commentaries expounding on the notion that this man is completely out of his depth, I just have to scratch my head. Given his inheritance, this has been the most substantive first term since Ronald Reagan’s. And given Obama’s long-game mentality, that is setting us up for a hell of a second one.

TPM: Rep. Paul Ryan, a leading advocate of shrinking entitlement spending and the architect of the plan to privatize Medicare, spent Wednesday evening sipping $350 wine with two like-minded conservative economists at the swanky Capitol Hill eatery Bistro Bis.

…Susan Feinberg, an associate business professor at Rutgers, was at Bistro Bis celebrating her birthday when she saw the label on the bottle Ryan’s table had ordered … it sold for an eye-popping $350, the most expensive wine in the house…

Feinberg, an economist by training, was even more appalled when the table ordered a second bottle. She quickly did the math and figured out that the $700 in wine the trio consumed over the course of 90 minutes amounted to more than the entire weekly income of a couple making minimum wage.

“We were just stunned,” said Feinberg, who e-mailed TPM about her encounter …After ending their meal and paying the check, Feinberg decided to give Ryan a piece of her mind. She approached the table and asked Ryan “how he could live with himself” sipping expensive wine while advocating for cuts to programs for seniors and the poor…..

The clash became especially heated when Feinberg asked the men if they were lobbyists. “F—- her,” one of them replied and stood up in a menacing way, according to Feinberg’s account…

… The one major aspect of the story in dispute was the topic of conversation at Ryan’s dinner table. Feinberg said all three men were “droning on loudly during the evening that liberals think that if you’re a millionaire, you have done something wrong.”

Issa is the Republican who called President Obama’s administration “one of the most corrupt ever” … but has an interesting past of his own (read here – there’s also a lengthy New Yorker profile of Issa here)